A Study of Awareness about �Nutrition in Hypertension� among College Teachers in a Semi Urban Town of South India

Abstract

Hypertension is reported to be the fourth contributor to premature death in developed countries and the seventh in developing countries. Recent reports indicate that nearly 1 billion adults (more than a quarter of the world’s population) had hypertension in 2000, and this is predicted to increase to 1.56 billion by 2025. The main aim of the study is to find out the level of knowledge of nutritional therapy in hypertension among college teachers through a structured questionnaire and to impart the necessary awareness about the same. This study was based on questionnaire survey by scientifically tested random sampling procedure. The necessary approval for the study was obtained from the academic committee of the Government Arts College for men (autonomous). As the study is a simple questionnaire one, there are no ethical issues. The information was collected from 911 teachers working in colleges and higher institutions. The collected data were entered and analyzed with the help of SPSS software. Statistical tests included simple frequency, percentage and Pearson Correlation techniques which were performed for the collected data. This present study demonstrates that the majority of the respondents were aged either between 31-40 and 41-50 years. 47.4 per cent and 36.6 per cent of male and female were having hypertension respectively which is higher than the general population. According to the ‘Suchitra’s grading’ of nutrition awareness, the level of knowledge in hypertension, 24.1 percent of the respondents are grade I, 26.5 percent grade II, 22.9 percent grade III and 26.5 percent grade IV. Its clear that college teachers lack awareness about nutrition in hypertension. The teachers who suffer from the disease i.e. hypertension had better awareness.